Outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder wants executives at Wall Street banks to face criminal charges, Bloomberg's Keri Geiger reports. Holder has asked U.S. attorneys involved in residential mortgage-backed securities cases to report in 90 days whether they can develop cases against individual bankers. The decision on whether action will be appropriate will be up to Loretta Lynch, the nominee to replace Holder, he said in a speech Tuesday.
As the trial proceeds in the murder of Etan Patz, who disappeared in 1979 while walking to a NYC bus, the Associated Press' Adam Geller reports on how confessions like the one in the Patz murder case can be clouded by defendants' mental illnesses. The presiding judge has found that Pedro Hernandez's confession to Patz's murder is admissible, but some experts said the defendant's history of mental illness "raise difficult questions about whether a suspect is exercising free will in talking to police, and greatly increase the potential for false confessions." Only the final part of Hernandez's interrogation was recorded, not the hours of questioning before he gave a videotaped recording.
Of the 300-plus people who have been cleared by the Innocence Project, a quarter falsely confessed, and 30 to 40 percent of those people were mentally ill or mentally disabled.
Three University of Pennsylvania bioethicists recently called for reestablishing mental asylums, The Inquirer's Stacey Burling reports. When large-scale institutions for people with mental illness were abandoned decades ago, smaller, community-based institutions were not created to house people instead. Jails and emergency rooms have become the new mental asylums because there are few community-based beds for people with severe mental illnesses. The bioethicists "argue that what really happened was not deinstitutionalization but transinstitutionalization," Burling reports. "That means that at least some residents of mental hospitals did not thrive in their communities, as hoped, but shifted to inappropriate institutions, most notably prisons." One of the paper's authors told Burling he envisions asylums built on campuses and emphasizing patient autonomy and recovery as much as possible.
Barrett Brown, a hacktivist, journalist and writer, was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison, less 28 months for time served, for threatening an FBI agent, for being an accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to protected computers owned by securities firms and interfering with a serach warrant, The Dallas Morning News' Tasha Tsiaperas reports.
At issue was whether Brown was aware that a link he shared online contained credit card information that had been hacked by others. Brown and his supporters argued that heightening his sentence for sharing the link would chill journalism and the First Amendnment. But U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay said Brown's involvement with the Anonymous hack was "'more than a mere posting of that link.”'
Brown said in a satirical statement that '“I’ll be provided with free food, clothes, and housing as I seek to expose wrongdoing by Bureau of Prisons officials and staff and otherwise report on news and culture in the world’s greatest prison system.'"
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has changed the jury instructions that should be given about eyewitness evidence, which is often more fallible than people think, the Boston Globe's Travis Andersen and Martin Finucane report. While the defendant did not get his conviction overturned, the high court has issued new instructions to be used in criminal cases going forward, including "a warning that a witness’s expressed certainty may not indicate accuracy, especially when the witness did not express the same level of certainty when first making the identification. The template also includes commentary on the complexity of recalling past events, the effect of stress on eyewitness identification, the length of time that elapsed between a crime and a person being identified, and issues associated with having a witness view a suspect multiple times during identification procedures. In addition, the instructions allow jurors to consider whether witnesses were exposed to descriptions given by others, including police officers, which 'may inflate the witness’s confidence in the identification.'"
The Washington Post's Robert O'Harrow Jr. reports: "Leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees on Friday called on the Justice Department to end the sharing of civil seizure proceeds with local and state police, a change that with few exceptions would cut the flow of hundreds of million of dollars annually to departments in every state." The concern is that law enforcement is incentivized to keep assets because the program allows police to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds, while federal agencies get 20 percent. In an investigation, the Washington Post found that more than $2.5 billion from cash seizures, conducted without search warrants and indictments, has been made since September 11, 2001.
Eric Taylor McDavid has had his convictions for being a radical, domestic ecoterrorist thrown because thousands of pages of evidence were not turned over by federal prosecutors to his defense counsel, the Sacramento Bee reports. McDavid allegedly plotted to bomb or torch the Nimbus Dam, a U.S. Forest Service lab and cellphone towers in the Sacramento region. McDavid's lawyers said he fell for a FBI informant "who later prodded him to take violent action against government targets with promises that they would later consummate a romantic relationship, and the informant entrapped him by providing money, housing and food to McDavid and his two codefendants.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled against lifetime registration for juvenile sex offenders, ruling a state law is unconstitutional because the juveniles have no ability to challenge an irrebuttable presumption they are likely to reoffend, the Associated Press reports: "'We agree with the juveniles that (the law)'s registration requirements improperly brand all juvenile offenders' reputations with an indelible mark of a dangerous recidivist, even though the irrebuttable presumption linking adjudication of specified offenses with a high likelihood of recidivating is not ‘universally true,'” Justice Max Baer wrote for the court.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has upheld the convictions of drunk-driving defendants based on blood samples taken by force, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Bruce Vielmetti reports. The court held in two cases that police relied in good faith on the law in place at the the time, even though the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police must get warrants to draw blood in most cases. In a third case, the Wisconsin justices found that a coerced blood draw met an exception for exigent circumstances set out in the U.S. Supreme Court precedent in Missouri v. McNeely.
Barrett Brown, a freelance journalist who also has been portrayed as an Anonymous hacktivist, has had his sentencing delayed until January 22, The Intercept's Michelle Garcia reports.
Before taking a plea deal, Brown faced more than 100 years in prison for posting links to stolen credit-card information hacked by others from the servers of security intelligence firms HBGary and Stratfor: "The HBGary hack revealed a coordinated campaign to target and smear advocates for WikiLeaks and the Chamber of Commerce, while the Stratfor hack provided a rare window into the shadowy world of defense contractors," Garcia reports.
Brown's defense attorneys objected to much of the evidence presented by prosecutors in a hearing this week, arguing it is not relevant to the charges he pled guilty to: threatening an FBI agent on a YouTube video while he was on withdrawal from Suboxone, trying to hide his laptops during the execution of a search warrant and "an offer Brown made to the hacker Jeremy Hammond, to contact Stratfor to see if the firm wanted redactions of the hacked materials."
Most troubling, Garcia reports, prosecutors revived the claim that Brown's posting the link to the stolen credit-card information constituted complicity with the hack, even though First Amendment concerns were raised by that prosecutorial argument. Defense attorney Ahmed Ghappour told Garcia that “'looking at that as criminal conduct would probably bring an end to all digital journalism, period. There would be no reporting on leaks.”'
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
